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Shelley Fralic: The Georgia Viaduct — what goes up must come down

City planners who argue the concrete spans should be removed ‘might have a point’

It has been deemed that the two aging elevated roads that connect Main Street via Georgia and Dunsmuir streets to the downtown core need to go, making way for more useful and neighbourly projects such as high-density affordable housing, office space and park land. They might have a point.

Photograph by: Ward Perrin
, PROVINCE

When you have strong convictions, no matter the subject, it is often difficult to switch philosophical gears, to admit that while you have always been strongly against something you are suddenly for it, the worry being that you will come off looking indecisive, easily swayable or, worse, wishy-washy.

That is especially true when it comes to progress, and politics, and even more so when you are of an age that is inherently averse to change in both landscape and social mores, and especially when you are firmly fixed in the generation that likes to think it invented the axiom that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The Georgia Viaduct ain’t broke. And because it’s second nature to want to preserve that which is old as the new works hard to obliterate the past — especially when it comes to this young city we live in — it has been easy to plant one’s feet firmly in the camp carrying the placards that read “hell no, it can’t go” whenever talk of taking the viaduct down pops up, which has happened again this week.

Thanks to the civic thinkers at 12th and Cambie, it has been deemed that the two aging elevated roads that connect Main Street via Georgia and Dunsmuir streets to the downtown core need to go, making way for more useful and neighbourly projects such as high-density affordable housing, office space and park land.

They might have a point.

More appropriately described as a twin bridge, the first Georgia Viaduct was built a century ago, and was replaced in 1972 by the two current structures, initially intended to be part of a freeway system through downtown. When the freeway idea was scrapped, the viaduct became a vital arterial link for traffic in and out of the core, and remains so today.

But as the city has grown up and gentrified around it, the viaduct has increasingly stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb, a great big chunk of unsightly concrete spanning some of the most expensive real estate in the country, with what lies beneath mostly a dark mess of weeds and industrial dross.

Forget for a moment that Vancouver’s decision-makers may well have a vested interest in demolishing the viaduct to make way for green space and housing, or that this looks like yet another hare-brained initiative by a myopic anti-car, anti-commuter council that could rival the backyard chickens/ bike lanes-loans/ wheat-growing nonsense, all of which have not a thing to do with running a city in a sensible, efficient, taxpayer-centric manner.

It’s easy, too, to not only distrust the municipal motives but to be suspicious that the current debate is just for show, and the decision has long been made — the viaduct issue has been on the table since 2009 — and that it’s been made in the best interests of the few, such as those who would most benefit from redevelopment. Like developers.

But here’s the thing. All the above may well be true, but it’s also true that the viaduct is showing its age, that it’s an eyesore, and that if the traffic that currently uses it can be smartly diverted — and there is some evidence it can — then Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson’s vision for the nearly five-city-block site the viaduct covers might well be worth considering.

So why not move some of that carefully orchestrated densification brio even farther east?

Community and business groups in Chinatown seem to support removal of the spans and redevelopment of the land, though many residents in the Strathcona neighbourhood east of Main are less enthusiastic, their worry focused on traffic issues. A report commissioned by city hall in 2011 found that 43,000 vehicles use the viaduct daily.

There have also been calls for the spans to be repurposed, perhaps as a pedestrian stroll modelled on the uber-popular High Line in Manhattan, a former elevated rail line that has been reinvented as public green space.

But if you look at the viaduct and the vacuum of space it occupies as not only carrying cars but symbolism, representing something of a physical and sociological schism between the city’s east and west sides, and if you view its existence as an impediment to completing the civic circle that would connect Strathcona and Chinatown and even Gastown with its southern and western neighbours on the edge of False Creek, then the argument makes itself:

It has been deemed that the two aging elevated roads that connect Main Street via Georgia and Dunsmuir streets to the downtown core need to go, making way for more useful and neighbourly projects such as high-density affordable housing, office space and park land. They might have a point.

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